Dr Lucrezia Canzutti is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of War Studies. Prior to starting her fellowship, she was a Research Associate on the ERC-funded project ‘Security Flows’ (led by Prof. Claudia Aradau) and a Lecturer in the Politics of Immigration at Newcastle University.

Lucrezia’s research is situated at the intersection of international relations, critical security studies and critical migration studies. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Political Geography, International Political Sociology, Environment and Planning C, Global Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Lucrezia’s research draws on a range of qualitative methods, including ethnography, archival research, oral histories, and creative practice. She is committed to collaborative and engaged research and has regularly worked with practitioners, artists and NGOs.

Research Interests

• Critical migration studies
• Borders and bordering mechanisms
• Politics of Violence
• Data and Archives
• Migrant resistance and refusal

Lucrezia’s research interests include (digital) borders, migration, violence, and data and archival practices. She has worked in different geographical contexts in both the ‘Global North’ (Italy, Spain, the UK) and the ‘Global South’ (Cambodia). Her current research, titled ‘Archives of Noncitizenship: Violence, Erasure and (Im)mobility in Cambodia’, offers a novel conceptualisation of Noncitizenship as a project of racial exclusion and erasure that sits on a continuum of state violence. Foregrounding the temporal, material and spatial dimensions of Noncitizenship, Lucrezia’s project asks how erasure can be evidenced and analysed, how it morphs over time, and how it is navigated and countered by those targeted by it.

Selected Publications

• Canzutti, L., & Aradau, C. (2024). Collecting, assembling, ordering: Border politics and the invisible data work of asylum. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23996544241230189
• Canzutti, L., & Tazzioli, M. (2023). Digital–nondigital assemblages: Data, paper trails, and migrants’ scattered subjectivities at the border. International Political Sociology. https://academic.oup.com/ips/article/17/3/olad014/7259756
• Aradau, C., & Canzutti, L. (2022). Asylum, Borders, and the Politics of Violence: From Suspicion to Cruelty. Global Studies Quarterly. https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/2/2/ksab041/6514224
• Canzutti, L. (2019), Co-Producing liminality: Cambodia and Vietnam's ‘shared custody’ of the Vietnamese diaspora in Cambodia. Political Geography. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629818301434
• Canzutti, L. (2019) Precarious (non-)citizens: a historical analysis of ethnic Vietnamese’ access to citizenship in Cambodia, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1-21.

For an up-to-date list of publications, see Lucrezia’s PURE Page.

Exhibitions

Dr Lucrezia Canzutti co-organised the exhibition Faint Traces with the Vietnamese artist Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai (Phnom Penh, 2–23 July 2025). The exhibition explored the history of the stateless Vietnamese minority in Cambodia, reflecting on the themes of violence, erasure, and (im)mobility.

The ethnic Vietnamese have lived in Cambodia for generations, many of them having arrived during or before the French colonial occupation. Yet, in the popular imaginary, they are cast as illegal immigrants and outsiders. Faint Traces invited viewers to pay attention to the ‘minor histories’ that have been buried, erased, and ignored in mainstream discourse, as a means of resisting divisive rhetoric and (re)imagining shared pasts and futures.

The exhibition’s artwork wove together personal accounts and archival materials, unveiling tales of displacement, dispossession, and deracination — but also survival, resilience, and kinship. Archives offer a productive starting point for reflecting on history, identity, and belonging. Colonial and post-colonial maps, photographs, and identity documents alert us to the continuities between past and present, and to the intergenerational presence of ethnic Vietnamese communities in Cambodia. Yet, the artworks in the exhibition did not use archival materials in their original form: they disrupted them, fragmented them, hid them, and juxtaposed them with Vietnamese people’s own stories, objects, memories, and knowledges.

Working across installation, photography, moving images, rubbings, drawings, and fragmented field notes, the exhibition encouraged the audience to consider how we might intervene in and reimagine (with) the Archive. Faint Traces was made possible through support from the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy Research and Impact Fund and the School of Security Studies Impact Fund.